All right, John.
Well, you have to be, I mean, a thrill
seeker from a very young age.
Yes, Yeah, I kind of started that way, I think.
Yeah, and now you have one of the coolest jobs in the world.
Yes, I do.
OK, so tell everybody exactly what you do.
I do a lot of things in the aerosport world.
The primary thing I do is, I'm the captain of the Red Bull Air
Force Team, which is an eight person--
Look at y'all.
Yeah, we're having fun.
That's our office.
Yeah, so I run a team of eight athletes that
are professional skydivers and base jumpers,
and we travel all around the world doing stunts and shows.
And in addition to that, I do a lot of stunts for the Hollywood
world, and a lot of really special kind
of dream-fulfilling projects for Red Bull.
OK, so how long, by the way, this wing suit
jumping that-- you're like a flying squirrel, right?
I guess you can say that.
How long how long ago did that start?
Well, way before my time, there's a few people trying
a version of it-- just sewing fabric between their jumpsuits
and--
They're not alive, right?
They're not--
OK.
But about 20 years ago, they started
kind of revolutionizing the sport
and developing the wing suits to be better and better.
And in the last decade, it's taking leaps and bounds
where we're able to do things like you're
seeing now, jumping off cliffs and flying down mountains.
So you're really just controlling
your speed and height and landing
with your arms and that suit.
Yeah.
There's no brakes like when you're on one
of those things with the--
Yeah, the only brake we have is when you pull your parachute.
You can't do anything.
So you have a parachute on the back?
Yeah.
You can't land them yet.
They're going too fast forward.
Right.
But, yeah, they're one of the most aerodynamic wings
out there.
Gravity is our engine.
It's what gives us our speed and our acceleration.
How fast are you going?
We average about 120 miles an hour
forward, while we're only descending at about 40, 45.
But you can change the angle of how you're flying,
and change those speeds quite dramatically.
Do you ever hit a bird?
No, I've hit a swarm of bees before.
You have?
Oh, that's horrible.
Yeah, it's all over my face.
Oh my God.
But I mean I wonder what birds think--
has a bird looked at you trying to catch up with you?
Under the parachute, yes.
I've flown next to birds under my parachute,
but in the wing suit I think they're just
getting out of your way.
We make a crazy sound going--
Yeah.
Like we're a human missile.
And is there a point where--
I mean, you've always been into this?
You haven't been scared?
Has there been an incident where you almost hit--
because you're close to the side or the bottom right?
Oh, yeah.
--of the mountain.
Yeah.
We're a very close proximity.
You know, I'm scared a lot, to be honest.
It's probably why I'm still here,
and still doing my job, because being scared kind of
keeps you in the right mindset.
But kind of a weird story, but at a young age in my career--
back in 2001, it was the first time
I ever did production movie, and my job
was to skydive out of a helicopter with snow skis
on though.
And then free fall for-- we jumped at 12,000 feet,
and the idea was to eventually pull a parachute,
land on top of this mountain, and ski away.
And we shot for like two weeks, and it was uneventful,
no big deal.
But without getting too technical of how it happened,
one of the jumps I had a malfunction where my parachute
lines wrapped around my skis and my boots and my bindings.
I fell for over 6,000 feet, and I
couldn't get any of the emergency stuff to fire.
And I landed on top of a mountain,
and I'm not making this up.
It was in New Zealand.
The mountain's name was Mount Invincible.
And I impacted the mountain, and went
through a lot of mental things.
I never lost consciousness, and I was talking to myself.
So I kind of got excited, like wow
there is an afterlife, because here I am talking to myself.
But long story, short, about a minute of that went by,
and the other stunt guy landed next to me.
And I woke up, did the whole wiggle
my fingers and toes things.
And I realized I didn't feel any pain, so I stood up,
and I didn't break a single bone--
and that was after falling 6,000 feet to impact.
Was there snow?
Did you go into snow?
Yeah.
Yeah, there was a little bit of snow luckily.
It was a lot of rock.
So that's what saved you is a little bit of snow?
Yeah, it was kind of--
But 6,000 feet-- how fast would you
be going at that, from 6,000 feet?
With the malfunction I was dealing with,
everybody that watched it said I was going pretty much free
fall speed, so I was about 100 miles an hour.
And you didn't break a bone?
Didn't break a bone.
I kind of feel like I live in a parallel universe now, that--
Right.
Then so do I, because I'm talking to you.
Welcome.
So both of us here in the parallel universe.
Wow, that's incredible.
Yeah.
All right, I want to talk to you some more after this more.
With John DeVore after this.
So you have two daughters.
How old are they?
11 and 13.
And they want to do this?
I don't know.
I'm not pushing them to do it.
They haven't directly come to me and said,
I want to jump out of an airplane.
But they're displaying signs of risk
already, like my daughter--
I organized a fun project on Lake Tahoe,
and we had helicopters out in the middle of the lake.
I took her up in the helicopter and hovered 15, 20 feet
in the air, and I told her she could jump if she wanted to,
and so she-- oh there you go, yeah.
So she climbed out of a helicopter and sent it,
so then I realized right then I'm probably in trouble when
she gets old enough to jump.
When you have a helicopter and saying you can jump,
I mean she's going to--
Who wouldn't, right?
Yeah.
But there is some kind of-- there's
a difference in your brain then my brain.
I mean the fact that you, like thrill-seekers have something.
There's something different, right?
Because you love that adrenaline rush.
Yeah, I do love it.
It's what kind of at a young age got me into the sport,
but then I fell in love with the art of Human flight.
And much more than the adrenaline rush
of what's going on, the freedom of flying my body
is what really felt right.
So this is the suit, right?
You got it.
And this is-- so basically you're in this,
and what's it made out of?
I mean, I don't know all the tech behind it
but it's basically just a nylon fabric
and it's 0 porosity so the air won't bleed through it.
You have pockets, you can carry cash?
Yeah all kinds of cash.
OK.
But yeah, basically you unzip this, and you'd climb inside,
you can see.
And these inlets here are on the front and back of the suit.
What's that for?
And so as soon as you jump off a cliff or out of an airplane,
wind rushes into these and it pressurizes the suit.
Oh.
And then the suit feels almost like a fixed wing.
It gets very strong and rigid.
And then that turns into our foil
that we then fly our bodies with more power than normal
in these suits.
Wow.
Well, I can imagine-- look, I can
imagine how amazing and quiet, silent that must be.
Well you said it's not silent, it
makes a lot of noise when you're flying?
Well, stick your head out of a car
going about 120 miles an hour and that's what it sounds like.
So it's not silent.
But it's peaceful.
Yeah.
It wouldn't be, if I was in it, my screams
would be louder than the sound.
It would just be me going ah the whole time.
But I imagine that is a really cool sensation.
I just can't imagine.
But I would do the flying the machines that you can kind of--
The indoor skydiving, that what you're talking about?
Indoor skydiving.
I would do that.
Yeah, they're amazing.
Because you can't get hurt, right?
Yeah, I mean you can always run into the walls in there,
but that's hard to do.
Right.
Well, anyway, it's great talking to you
because this is fascinating to me.
It's just amazing that you're doing this.
Yeah, I love it.
I love sharing the passion of the sport,
and educating the world on what we do for a living.
It's a special thing.
Very, very cool.
You can watch more of John's skydives and base jumps
on redbull.com.